Posts tagged Disaster

Samsung's got strong LTE (and LTE-A, and... whatever's next) bones and now it's looking to shift the commercial tech into the emergency services. Public safety announcements has been a project of the 3GPP for a while. What's that, you say? It's a ragtag gang of superheroes telecoms groups and orga...

Rolled up, the Tuuli Armor looks like any other sleeping bag, but according to its inventor, it can safeguard you from something much harsher than insects and the cold. Apparently, the bag was designed to protect you during tornados, and while it can't exactly prevent broken bones, it can shield y...

Folks who have nabbed a ride from Uber during major snowstorms in New York City know all too well about the car service's price gouging during those events. Now, the outfit is capping rates during disasters and "relevant states of emergency" in the US, donating commissions from those surge trips t...

Google's and Twitter's relationship has been a bit rocky since the former launched a social network of its own, but, for the greater good, that's changing. When a "more extreme" natural disaster strikes, Google Now, Search and Maps will populate with tweets related to the Public Alert event in an ...

While some soldiers have virtual reality training to familiarize themselves with the battlefield, paramedics and other rescuers are out of luck; their first crisis is frequently all too real. Intelligent Decisions isn't happy with that lack of preparation, so it's developing a VR system that gives...

One of the biggest arguments against fixing climate change is that it would cost too much. Not so, says the UN's climate change panel, which has found that abandoning fossil fuels would only knock around 0.06 percent off the world's GDP. According to the report, if low-carbon energy quadruples by ...

When disasters strike, communication services tend to go down; you can't simply call for help or share your location online. However, engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology have found a way to use a smartphone as a rescue beacon when there aren't any available net...

Vodafone Foundation (the carrier's philantrophic arm) has launched a 24-pound mobile network in a backpack to help folks contact family and friends in the wake of a disaster. The device called the Instant Network Mini may be relatively small, but it provides a 2G GSM connection capable of handling...

We know, we know, Google has the whole hot air balloon thing covered. But this idea is a bit different. It consists of a group of "helikites," or small load-bearing balloon-kite hybrids, which can quickly be launched to form a network of LTE or WLAN masts up to an altitude of 2.5 miles, providing ...

It's been more than two years since the tragic Eastern Japan tsunami and resulting Fukushima Prefecture nuclear plant crisis, but many of those who lived in affected areas still can't return: witness the 21,000 residents of Namie, who had to evacuate and haven't been back since. Thanks to a newly ...

Everyone in the games industry and community has been watching in fascination as EA has bungled SimCity's release almost every way possible over this past week. From servers losing city information to always-on DRM practices requiring internet connections to massive user review backlash to length...

When trouble looms, most people turn to the internet before anything else. As such, the search giant is ensuring that it's offering public alerts to those in disaster-prone regions. Following a rollout in the US last year, Google is also adding disaster warnings to its local versions of Search, Ma...

Communication has been all too spotty across much of New York City and New Jersey since Hurricane Sandy struck the region, and those who can get through on their cellphones have found themselves on particularly crowded networks. AT&T and T-Mobile are providing some much-needed, if temporary, r...

Robots come in many flavors. There's the subservient kind, the virtual representative, the odd one with an artistic bent, and even robo-cattle. But, typically, they all hit the same roadblock: they can only do what they are programmed to do. Of course, there are those that posses some AI smarts, t...

Built-in power supply? Check. Ability to survive anything? Check. Easy to control? Okay, anyone who's had a cockroach as an uninvited houseguest knows that's not the case. So, rather than re-inventing the biological wheel with a robotic version, North Carolina State university researchers have fig...

Emergency services are embracing technology as new ways to investigate, send alerts and receive reports of crises. And now, the Japanese are looking at social networks to support communication in disaster scenarios, especially when traditional services fail. The local Fire and Disaster Management A...

It's a fairly menacing sight, an aluminum robot sporting big tank treads -- that is, until you watch one of its creators do a handstand on top of the thing in a pair of cargo shorts. And really, while the 'bot wouldn't look too out of place with a small machine gun strapped to its front, its inten...

Formation-flying quadrocopters have already given us hours of entertainment, but now they've also accomplished something serious. Earlier this month, mini choppers developed at Japan's robot-loving Chiba University assisted in an emergency drill that simulated an explosion at a chemical plant. Fou...

Instead of spending millions upon millions to clean up the next oil spill, why don't we just all pitch in and buy some soap? That's basically what researchers at the University of Bristol are proposing, with a new kind of soap that's apparently like no other. This soap, you see, is magnetic, which...

Google has put the devastation of March's Japanese tsunami in hauntingly stark relief, with the release of a new Street View feature that covers the country's most ravaged regions. It's all part of an initiative to "digitally archive" the aftermath of this year's earthquake and tsunami, with St...